Sunday, December 07, 2008

Earlier this year I began doing style guide art for the new Cartoon Network animated series, 'Speed Racer-The Next Generation'. Working alone and in collaboration with some friends we created a number of poses and character art for licensors to use as they needed. These can be used on anything from garments to school supplies to paper plates. IDW Publishing decided to use a couple of my pieces for the covers of their Speed Racer-Next Generation comic. For issue #1 they used some exisiting style guide art, but went with mine on issue #2. There's an ad for the next issue, also using my artwork, in the back. Unfortunately, I didn't get any credit in the individual comic, but I should get a mention in the trade paperback collected edition. The background textures in both were added by someone in the IDW art department, utilizing other style guide art. The leaping Chim Chim was published in IDW's digest sized Speed Racer-The Next Generation Animated, Vol. 1.

Posted here alongside the finished Illustrator files are some of my original pencil drawings and inks for a few of the pieces I did. Most of the art seen here was done this way, with the exception of the Chim Chim ones, where I did all the inking directly in Illustrator. Besides the stuff here, and the Next Generation art that I did in collaboration with friends (they would do the pencils, then I would go in and tighten that up, ink it, and do the final Illustrator art), I also did some classic Speed Racer art, updating old drawings, including two pieces used as life-size standees for display purposes; one of Speed and the Mach 5 and the other of Racer X and the Shooting Star.